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Another Tibetan Sets Fire to Self Over China Rule

BEIJING — A 19-year-old former monk in a Tibetan town in western China set himself on fire on Saturday in a desperate plea for Tibetan independence, according to reports on Sunday by Tibet advocacy groups. The flames were put out by police officers stationed on the street, and he was taken to a police station, the reports said.

The former monk, Norbu Damdrul, was the eighth monk or former monk to set himself on fire to protest China since March. All the self-immolations have taken place in Tibetan areas of Sichuan Province that lie in the remote region Tibetans call Amdo. At least four Tibetans have killed themselves in the wave of self-immolations, which scholars of modern Tibet say are a new and startling protest strategy by monks.

The attempt at self-immolation by Norbu was the seventh one this year in the town of Aba, called Ngaba by Tibetans. All of them have involved monks from Kirti Monastery, an institution that was a rallying point during the widespread Tibetan uprising in 2008.

Reports by advocacy groups say at least 10 Tibetans were killed by security forces during protests in Aba that spring. Many of the bodies were brought into Kirti, where monks took digital photographs of the corpses and transmitted them to people outside China. The photographs have been shown to foreign reporters visiting Kirti’s sister monastery in Dharamsala, India, the seat of power of the Tibetan government-in-exile and the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader.

Since the 2008 uprising, tension has built around Kirti Monastery, and at least 300 monks were taken away by security forces one night this April. They were sent to undergo “patriotic re-education,” according to reports by Tibetan groups, and many have not returned.

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On Saturday, Norbu shouted, “We need freedom and independence for Tibet” as he set himself aflame, according to a report by the International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group based in Washington that has contacts inside Tibetan areas. Norbu also called for the return of the Dalai Lama to Tibet. The group’s sources said Norbu had lived with his parents since June 2010, and it was unclear under what circumstances he had left Kirti.

Norbu’s act “provides further evidence that Tibetans now feel that setting fire to themselves is their only recourse,” Stephanie Brigden, the director of Free Tibet, a London-based group, said in a written statement. A report released this month by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a bipartisan group under the United States Congress, noted the intense repression in Tibetan areas.

Human Rights Watch released a study last week that said spending on security in Aba and Ganzi, another Tibetan area of Sichuan, rose sharply after 2002 and has been several times the amount of security expenses in non-Tibetan parts of Sichuan. This indicates that the unrest that came in 2008 and afterward was at least in part a result of a surge in heavy-handed security measures, the study said.

A version of this article appears in print on October 17, 2011, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Another Tibetan Sets Fire To Self Over China Rule. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe